Thank you very much for the read up on the process that you went through to identify the VDP pricing formula. It reads similarly to some of the research that I had done in the past, and it's always enjoyable to read something like this. If at all possible, could you post your raw information (or at the very least send it to me via PM), and possibly the GM cheat script that you used to manipulate items? It seems that there are at least 3 different independently coded scripts that were used to evaluate different parts of the demo (Batlin's, yours, and mine). I'd like to see exactly what function calls were used to do what so I can try and replicate the data on my own, and reference it against your data.

With that out of the way, a couple of brief comments...

nightshark wrote:

Note that although these values do not match perfectly with what is listed here: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010414 ... eapons.htm The values are always within +-3gp. And though the formula is so slightly off against the weapons in this link, the formula matches 100% with the weapons that are found in the demo. Remember that the link above was roughly 3 years after the demo, and it is possible that speed/hit point/ingot costs may have been slightly changed during that time for some weapons. For instance, the bardiche and executioners axe both have different speed values in the demo vs stratics, and the damage levels are ALL massively different.

This is likely due to the fact that weapon speeds and damages were changed with the 11/10/98 patch that introduced the new weapons scale that we see during T2A and UOR. All archived information, as well as some research into weapons and armor values on our end, points to the same number of resources being required to create the items for the entire duration of T2A and UOR, which essentially rules out any modification to that part of the formula. There's still the possibility that overall durability was modified, but I suspect that if we applied the weapon statistics found on stratics archives with the formula you provided here, we would get identical numbers to the highest VDP values seen for items.

nightshark wrote:

The blacksmithing skill is extremely bugged. When an item is created, the demo checks for whether the crafted item should be exceptional. The demo does not apply any flag to an exceptional item, but instead increases its durability by 20%, and then *tries* to apply an increased dice offset to the newly created weapon. It's interesting to note that the demo does not give a flat +4 dice offset to every exceptional weapon, but instead, the demo calculates the additional offset based on the existing damage of the weapon. For an exceptional halberd, 4 is added to the offset (sound familiar?), but for a katana, only 1 is added to the offset (partially since the demo katana is only 1d16). The major bug is that the new offset is not applied to the newly created weapon, but is instead applied to the smith hammer that was used to create it. This means that if you make 10 GM halberds with a smith hammer, the smith hammer will go from being 4d6+0 to 4d6+40. If you make 20, the smith hammer will be 4d6+80. This means you can create godly smith hammers in the demo and one shot other players/creatures with them.

This would obviously have been fixed, but the interesting part of that to me was the difference between a halberd and a katana's offset. It seems like katanas should not be given +4 damage on an exceptional craft, but rather only 1 additional damage. This would, however, be a major blow to crafting, as any katana that is might or above would now be better than a crafted one.

Addressing only the bolded part, the working theory is that the 11/10/98 patch notes contained a particular line item which said the following:

Quote:

A retroactive weapons fixer will adjust weapons to fit the new weapons statistics going in. This code will attempt to transfer over your old weapons and adjust them to the correct weapons scale. It will fix one-hit weapons, "prepatch" weapons with outdated damage ratings, weapons with multiply applied magical bonuses, and similar problems. However, it may not function perfectly with all particular combinations of weapon abilities. In particular, exceptional quality weapons may lose some of their capability in the adjustment.

The belief is that the italicized part was intended to recognize that some of the highest damage non-bugged exceptional blacksmith weapons that were created before the weapons patch on 2/12/98 would lose some of their damage as part of the weapons adjustment, assuming that the +4 exceptional value that is found on later archives is applied evenly across all weapons.

Now, it's certainly possible that the caveat was given as a catch all, or as a warning against weapons that were effectively getting nerfed. However, a comparison between the 2/12 to 11/10 weapon statistics and the post 11/10 weapon statistics shows that virtually every weapon received a significant speed or damage upgrade in the process. This suggest that all weapons were significantly upgraded during the patch, which would make the loss of effectiveness a strange point.

Of course this doesn't rule out other possibilities such as the retroactive fixer being coded in such a way that it couldn't tell an exceptional weapon from a non-exceptional one under certain conditions (e.g. looking at durability to determine whether something is or isn't exceptional), but we feel that the greatest number of factors that can be controlled for, are, with the theory described above.

nightshark wrote:

As for blacksmithing, unfortunately the demo is not a good go-to for the values there, in my opinion. Craft systems in general in the demo appear to have been work in progress. The minimum value to craft are far off what they are on Stratics, and there are patch notes in 98/99 which state that some blacksmithing values have been changed. However the demo does say that the formula: avgDmg * speed is used to determine the min/max values for crafting.

I have, however, "decoded" what a lot of the variables in blacksmithing mean and plan to completely decode that script when I have more time. You can see the code here, it's WIP:

You may not need to redouble at least some of the work on the blacksmithy script, as I've spent some time digging into that particular script myself. I have a series of posts here detailing some of the technical aspects of how we know that certain weapon/armor speeds, damages, and armor ratings are correct, and it is basically an analysis of the demo script itself. I have more technical documentation that I can send you via PM if you're interested in seeing it as well.

_________________

UOSA Historian and former staff member: August 11, 2008 - June 19, 2016

So, still a little confused, what is it that UOSA has not implemented? I'm also thinking about the research that was done to confirm blacksmithing-difficulty on certain items vis-à-vis weapon-speed ratings (iirc, specifically the katana): doesn't UOSA use "getValue" for that (or, rather, derive getValue from item-creation, which is derived, in turn, from item-behavioural-properties ...)?

I'll answer this part for you, hopefully to your liking.

On UOSA, we still largely use the RunUO default method of determining the value of an item as it pertains to the VDP in terms of allowing your own player vendor to automatically price an item, or what would be the displayed value via the Item Identification skill (note: our Item ID skill doesn't return the value of an item, which is obviously wrong).

As for the correct stats for weapons and armor (e.g. speed, damage, durability), we use the values found in the stratics archives found here. What amounts to a verification that those values are reliable is found via the link at the bottom of my previous post in this thread.

Now, as for the success chances for crafting specific pieces of armor or weaponry, I actually can't comment on that at all. As of now, I don't believe that we've implemented a rather important formula from the demo, getSkillSuccessChance, into any of our success checks for various skills, but I do believe that Derrick has done work in the past to approximate the correct difficulty when crafting blacksmithy items. This is obviously something we should do over time, but it's not a straightforward task due to how the that function is referenced in the demo.

_________________

UOSA Historian and former staff member: August 11, 2008 - June 19, 2016

If at all possible, could you post your raw information (or at the very least send it to me via PM), and possibly the GM cheat script that you used to manipulate items? It seems that there are at least 3 different independently coded scripts that were used to evaluate different parts of the demo (Batlin's, yours, and mine). I'd like to see exactly what function calls were used to do what so I can try and replicate the data on my own, and reference it against your data.

Yes I can supply these. Most of the data was kept in excel documents, but as I started to come across a working formula, I usually stopped recording what I was doing and sometimes deleted columns. In some cases I overwrote raw data with cell calculations once the value was known to be equal, which in hindsight, I shouldn't have done. But with the functions I've added in the GM cheat script, it will be easy to replicate this in a short amount of time. I'll link that when I have some time.

Quote:

I suspect that if we applied the weapon statistics found on stratics archives with the formula you provided here, we would get identical numbers to the highest VDP values seen for items.

Very close but not always exact. As SighelmofWyrmgard mentioned, there are various reasons why this might be the case. Slightly incorrect stratics values for speed or durability, or mis-reported values by players. In the case of the Kryss, for example, stratics lists this as 53 speed and 90 max durability. Plugging this formula in results in the Kryss having a max value of 50, yet it was reported as being 49 max in 2001. There could possibly be some rounding issues to be found or slight tweaks to the constant values. This would most easily be found by increasing durability/speed 1 at a time to find where the breakpoints are, then finding a constant that fits. However I am quite confident on what is already there.

Quote:

You may not need to redouble at least some of the work on the blacksmithy script, as I've spent some time digging into that particular script myself. I have a series of posts here detailing some of the technical aspects of how we know that certain weapon/armor speeds, damages, and armor ratings are correct, and it is basically an analysis of the demo script itself. I have more technical documentation that I can send you via PM if you're interested in seeing it as well.

Thanks, that's an interesting read and matches with what I have discovered so far about blacksmithing. It would be interesting to map stratics speed/damages to an excel spreadsheet and find what the output values are for minimum blacksmithy skill.

It's a real shame that the UO98 forums have gone down. Do you know if there is any plan to bring them back up? Is there a backup? If not, I could create a forum to share demo research under a new domain.

_________________<green> grats pink and co. .... the 3 of you f---ing scrubs together can blow up a bard. IMPRESSIVE

Shh... don't tell anyone... You'll have to replace all of the joinuo.com links with uo98.org links within each of the posts, but it's surprisingly still there (I think we can even make posts there, although I don't know of anyone who reads it).

_________________

UOSA Historian and former staff member: August 11, 2008 - June 19, 2016

All of my questions have been satisfactorily answered. Thanks for the consideration, and for the peek behind the curtain.

I now understand (a little better) what is implemented live, here, and why, and what isn't, and understand the associated limitations: there were matters of provenance which, while expected, I had no way to qualify. Thanks, Kaivan, for diverting to enlighten me.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 38 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum